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Saudade

“Man is not free to refuse
to do the thing which gives him
more pleasure than any
other conceivable action.” – Stendhal

III 1: Pure potentiality and suffering

forceps bruise her unformed head
Shakespeare’s extraordinarily gifted
sister is born, made aware
of her conscious mind, she will
now address the reader as an I
already creating lexical lists,
exploring the avenues
of concurrent thought
am I dreaming or the
universal dreamer?

III 1.1: Anything can happen

it does

III 2: The sanatorium collides with the imaginarium

I keep you under lock and key
like the Marquis de Sade
my kaleidoscopic star,
you blow my mind
and arouse my (curiosity)
I’m repelled, terrified, and
utterly besotted by your shenanigans

III 3: Neologisms ignite the thaw

I will write my way to freedom
into or out of sanity depending
on the size of my nonsense
dance to the compelling
beat of semiotic erotica

IV 1: The awakening and immersion

Your image arrives in my mind
and I realize what it is
to melt in the presence
of another’s beauty
travelling an infinite distance
to caress the contours of your face
embrace your anarchic heart

I make no claims upon it
will not burn it or suck it dry
before you are gone
only I want to see it beat
and respond to the world
its liberty astounds

IV 2: Without a room of her own watching the procession of the sons of educated men

a spiritual medium scrys:
you know nothing of the frustration,
the rage to master
crushed by the tides
of apathy, misogyny, and abuse
my ferocity burns mountains to ash

IV 3: Conflation of the immensely attractive and talented jester genius, the teasing diver, the downtrodden poet philosopher, the spiritual professor, a faithful cuckold (almost), a foreign artist, the intriguing flatterer/thinker, all the gods and monsters, matter and antimatter, and me, the one who refuses to be cast as the observed

Hofstadter laughs at my quandary
we no longer need to get together
fuck, or even exchange e-mail, now
that we understand that our consciousness,
our ‘I’ is distributed among all our brains
as part of the ‘strange loop’
it makes human interaction redundant
I’ll keep to my cave
Zarathustra Rapunzel
consummate performance artist

unless, of course, mind melding
isn’t the primary agenda
linguistic experimentation is
akin to sexual creativity
was Joyce masturbating
or gifting us a vital energy?
(he so wanted to be natural)
will my art be tainted like Bronte’s
with rage and sexual frustration?

I gave up everything for you
but gave it to someone else
who shattered it into pieces

V 1:Fluid cyclicality

an enormous aureate ouroboros forms
and proceeds to consume itself –
it’s in its nature

V 2: Chameleonic desire, a great daimon

the most profound expression of the self
or even more ontological than this ‘I’
the loam out of which a self emerges
Plato’s divine spark longing
to unite with ever more
transcendent forms of beauty

V 3: Interstices and penumbra of the soul

Eros awaits in the density of allusion
cartographic intertextual patterns
that gather in erotic cathexis
vast ecosystem arises
integrates with the eternal

V 4: Skeleton key

for a moment I thought
you caught sight of
me in the corner of your eye,
availed your coruscant intellect
and emotional intensity to really see –
not observe but engage,
an eye that challenges but invites
a look that doesn’t degrade,
demand, or destroy but makes whole
a look of recognition
often only given by
an inner paramour

V 5: Anything can happen

I will live here in the poem
and begin to see what is possible

Notes: This poem was written for Victoria’s excellent prompt on literary allusion at dVerse Poets Pub. It makes allusions to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (perhaps the most allusion laden literature ever written), Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and the philosophical writing of John Riker. The title Saudade is Portuguese and means the feeling of longing for something that you love and is lost. Another linguist describes it as a ‘vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.’

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80 Comments:

where do i even begin…other than in awe that this just spilled out of you anna..seriously…how? smiles…dense with thought and lines i could repeat…one favorite bit i hope remains every fiction, mostly due to my inclination toward physical touch…now
that we understand that our consciousness,
our ‘I’ is distributed among all our brains
as part of the ‘strange loop’
it makes human interaction redundant
I’ll keep to my cave
Zarathustra Rapunzel
consummate performance artist…but dang, its good…and intrigued as well that you take us from birth on…intriguing write…

I don’t know, please don’t hate me if I tell you it spilled out in under an hour – I thought with Joyce a stream of consciousness like piece would be best. When I am rushed for time I tend to stick with what I am familiar with so there it is, a mash up of influences and my own strange set of eyes and stylistic quirks.

this is great, and I can believe in under an hour..when the muse strikes strong enough, one doesn’t ned to “bye carful of whit you w”. (a phrase that came to my jarred linguistic centers after reading some Joyce

I can never find the words to give your writings the praise they deserve. The part Brian mentioned resonated with me as well, but there were so many awe inspiring phrasing a in this that I can’t find a favorite. I will be musing over this a bit. Every time you write Anna, a part of me falls in love with you. Such a beautiful mind.

Brilliant. Each section stands as a masterpiece in it’s own right. You’ve chose some of the most difficult poets to emulate. For some reason, the first few parts made me think of Mary Todd Lincoln…perhaps, like Woolf, that brush with mental illness and that horrible room of hers in the “aslyum” and within her own mind.

Anna, you help us to see that poetry has the intense power of pure spirit as your /coruscate intellect/ runs naked, unfettered, unflinching through the morass of Joyce, the darkness of Woolf, the pain of Dickinson, the pluck & madness of Plath. I, too, feel helpless to even comment in/on the beauteous bosom of your work. I love the rollercoaster ride you put us on, reading Finnegan as we drop 50 feet biting our tongue, and the run-on non-stop stanzas wear masks, flipping them as we turn away, swapping them as we return our gaze, and I feel led by your imagination, like a scuffler in the metaphysical stew, my old tiny legs cramping as I endeavor to keep up with you.

Your piece really touched me and your note of translation broke my heart for it mirrors my current challenge, but also encouraging. Writing is good for that, it shows us as we are and what we can be. You have a great gift. I enjoy your presence.

Me too with you Jane, I am loving where you took the prompt. Have you seen the German film Wings of Desire? Angels in Berlin follow residents through their days, it’s very poetic and beautiful, I think you might enjoy it. Wim Wenders wrote and directed it. They made a cheesy American version called City of Angels which was forgettable.

Wings of Desire is one of my all time favorite movies. I love when Damiel has his first cup of coffee; I see this scene in my mind’s eye when I am lacking appreciation or feel uncomfortably cold… It is Interesting you should ask this as I sit here working on a poem involving wingless angels.:)

Wow, that’s beautiful synchronicity. I love the black and white cinematography and utterly poetic dialogue. I can’t wait to read your wingless angel poem. How wonderful you love Wings of Desire too, I had this moment of horror where I thought maybe City of Angels is your favorite movie and there I am calling it forgettable.

I can only read this as a remarkable example of pure inspiration delivered direct from the gods. I stand in awe of it — and “awe” is a word I promised myself I would never use in this context. See, now look what you’ve done!

Wow, never heard of “saudade” but it sounded much like the Japanese word 懐かしい (natsukashii). So I looked it up and low and behold there is a Japanese movie by that Portuguese name. I will come back to the poem later — though allusion rich poetry is a nemesis of mine. Not one ounce of saudade there. [I’m off to work but wanted to read your intro before trying to read the poem — will do the poem later with a patient mind, hopefully.]

That’s fascinating, I’ll have to look up that movie. I know that this will be torture for you so I’ll be back in a bit with some links to ease your reading. In exchange might I be extended a bit of extra patience when you read it later?

Well, I read it.
I doesn’t do anything for me.
I can’t absorb any of it.
I saw touches and allusions to the links you left. So those were helpful.
But it seems like the poem is too busy, too packed, trying too hard to say, “See all the stuff I know, see all the things I can say.”
I probably can’t resonate with this poem for similar reasons that you said you didn’t like mine. Interesting different folks, eh?

You know when you evoke the interior paramour you are speaking my language. A rich and longing poem, fully living up to its emotionally freighted title, and full of excellent lines, especially the ending.

One of my favorites of yours, Anna. I especially like both the Woolfian/woman’s angle both in terms of long=suffering on the romantic and intellectual side. Very well done. Many wonderful lines – I especially liike Anything can happen –it does. k.

You will laugh when I tell you where the inspiration for that chapter heading came from – a song Anything Could Happen by Ellie Goulding that another poet introduced me to yesterday. I do love a Room of One’s Own and come back to it – I have a poem titled Cats Do Not Go To Heaven in its honor. Thank you, Karin!

Very interesting. For now merely a comment on “Saudade”—one of my favourite words in my native, mother tongue—Galician—which makes the word not only Portuguese but also Galician, from my native, here and now, lovely Galicia in northwest Spain.(It’s raining, despite the soft northeaster, feeding our green contours everywhere). I digress. And so the word “saudade” is Galician first. It is a most difficult word to pin down. It is heard in our centuries’ old poetry and in our songs. It is a feeling, hence the difficulty of expressing it, and very much of this land—the sadness and forlornness of it. It is poetic to the core—and so I congratulate you for find it for this fine creation of yours (which deserves separate commentary).

About two weeks ago I spent a couple of hours going over “saudade”. Can you believe that? To try and capture its melancholy meaning. Its solitude. There is a painting by Brazilian Almeida Júnior entitled “Saudade” that gives that painter’s vision of it—that sad, pretty , lonely young lady reminiscing over a love letter?—perhaps. It is about the sadness of color and the earth.

Years ago our very own Galician, Ramón Piñeiro, wrote about the philosophy of “saudade” in an essay entitled “On a Philosophy about Saudade”, where Piñeiro explains that “saudade” as a state of mind derived from feelings of loneliness. It has also been compared to the German Sehnsucht, which considers it a sort of search of a lost object or feeling that one considers necessary or vital.

You chose a lovely word, Anna.

Sorry for these digressions, as I was just walking out the door. I shall return to the poem, probably tomorrow.

(I also spent a good long hour streaming a poem yesterday but could not get myslf to post it. Sometimes that happens. It’s long, like yours.)

Thank you for this education on the etymology of saudade, it’s fascinating. I love that you recently explored it, I had been introduced to it last year and wanted to find a proper context in which to use it. I will look for the painting and the essay. I appreciate your digression, it is the nuance of life which I find so compelling. I hesitate in posting longer pieces but frequently do it anyway.

‘Now, these intimate feelings, insofar as they are lived, are yearning (saudade); insofar as they are expressed or communicated they are lyricism. Both yearning (saudade) and lyricism come from a common root: the feeling heart of man. These intimate feelings are the awareness of one’s own individuality, of the uniqueness of each human being. Every man is a unique being and feels himself to be such in his feeling heart. His solitude and yearning (saudade) live right there: all the many forms of his solitude, which are indeed varied since they take in the full range of his spiritual transcendence. Since each person is unique, a unique individual who experiences himself and his existential solitude through his feelings, he is also a transcendent being. Man’s spirit is constantly transcending loneliness, constantly communicating its unique being to other beings, with the world and, finally, to Being itself. Man lives simultaneously in isolation and loneliness and in transcendence of his own being. Solitude itself, without transcendence, with no reference to other beings or to Being, would lack all meaning. Loneliness and yearning, saudade, is yearning for something.

So man’s being moves in two dimensions: that of his private solitude and that of his transcendent communication. In the first dimension he lives out his uniqueness through his feelings; in the second, this unique being comes out of its isolation, transcends itself, and opens itself to everything that is outside itself, or that is beyond its own uniqueness. This transcendence is engaged in an incessant activity of cognition and exercise of the will. But every act of transcendence presupposes, beyond the individual from which it comes, a term of reference, a transcendent object of transcendence itself.’

ha…read the poem..then read through the comments…and read that it spilled out in under an hour…there just must be some kind of word treasure box under high pressure in your chest and when you open it, this is what happens…smiles…i like

I love your narrator’s journey to and from company as she samples–poem to poem–the possibilities of being seen and left whole. I especially like “III 1.1: Anything can happen” and “III 3: Neologisms ignite the thaw” and
“it makes human interaction redundant
I’ll keep to my cave
Zarathustra Rapunzel
consummate performance artist” !!
and “V 4: Skeleton key” to the marvelous end.
As usual, I think each plot point can be a song/painting–
and now that I have seen your creation for NWCU, I want more!
I gulped it down, greedy for more.

Don’t worry about reading comments – your impressions are most valuable and don’t require the filters of others. I do both and sometimes like to approach work innocently as you put it. If you’d like more music you can find it at http://chromasymphonic.com where many of my compositions live (though without video images). I will likely do more pieces for NWCU like this last one so I’ll let you know if I do. I think you hit the emotional core of the piece, thank you!

I have not read the works of those writers, so I can’t comment how effective the allusion.

Thoughts:
Always reading your poem, is like reading about an artist exploring her own mind journeys with bits of influences, peeks into influences from real life, what’s going on around her in the physical world. There’s a feeling of some kind of crush feelings for someone, and then not daring to go so far or to have it and to hold it too tightly.

Is it that something unreachable or more likely is so strange and wonderful that to connect it with it –would one be somewhat afraid what will happen when one gets what one wishes for?

Reading this on a more personal application-type level, bits of it seem to touch in me the struggles I have in writing and poetry, creativity is like another spirit, sometimes I feel like I have it close to me and I can just write anything to life for hours and sometimes, it’s just not there. Not a single word can be found and no dance. I run after creativity and poetry and get played like a foolish plain jane in high school trying to get attention of the most popular boy in school. When I thought I moved on, he calls. Something like that.

I think it is a combination of attraction to another but also how eros is our impulse to engage the world, to explore our inner and outer worlds. You make some excellent points, especially in the relationship one has to one’s own creativity. The desire to realize our imaginative impulses drive us to create. Yet there’s always that inevitable chasing down our muse. You always bring exciting insights into the work, thank you :D!

If poets cannot find words to describe your work, there’s no hope for me. Coming from Henry and Laurie, I feel like I had been playing poet at dVerse. Still your beautiful powerful words inspire. Thank you

Oh, I think we all play at being poets, it keeps our work fresh. Too often we think that creativity has to be seriously applied to be respectable or acceptable but I feel that the process is a learning experience and best approached like play :D. Thank you Lisa.

hullo Anna,
thank you for a beautiful poem with a feeling which seems universal, like losing a limb or family or the gap and raw rude sunlight left by felled trees. i am sorry because i can’t imagine being able to write this poem without having felt this and that would be an achy feeling. respect.

this is a very vast and playful inter-scape here, concepts of identity and i-you (i prefer i-you to i-thou) action and reaction to the world and the self in the world, and even the world-less self. i don’t get into philosophy much but… you make so fun! very well done.

I will write my way to freedom
into or out of sanity depending
on the size of my nonsense
dance to the compelling
beat of semiotic erotica

Wow, for someone who doesn’t get into philosophy much you’ve really captured the essence of the philosophy and so eloquently as well. I relate to that part a lot every day :D. Wonderful to see you again, thank you for the fascinating comment.

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[…] & Velleity. I decided to take my own challenge and rewrite a poem that expressed velleity (Saudade) and write one that illustrates volition. It is a very personal piece so I have disabled comments. […]

Robert Anton Wilson

Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

Witold Gombrowicz

“Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog.” Ferdydurke

I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.

Gustav Flaubert

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Dušan “Charles” Simić

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Monique Wittig

"Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it... Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being - subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say 'I' I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor. "

W.S. Merwin

All the things that really matter to us are impossible...Writing poetry is impossible. I don't know how to write a poem. A poem - there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don't know. There is so much that comes out of what we don't know and what we don't have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. - from Doing the Impossible, Yes Magazine, Issue 59

Thomas Aquinas

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.